Transcript
GAIL OWENS: Nauru at the moment, a lot of women are not standing as candidates so we were looking for the reasons behind that and what could be done to encourage them into politics. Linked to that was civic awareness and voter education, so just raising awareness in the community ab out their role as voter, and looking at how we could perhaps broaden that, linking into the education system to reach younger people in Nauru as well. Other recommendations were around, I guess, the technicalities of electoral law, sort of looking at how that affected the community and candidates. So one of the issues we looked at is the requirement for anyone who is a public servant to resign three months prior to the issuing of the writs, if they wish to be a candidate. And there is some difficulty with that because some times people don't know three months in advance because they don't the date of the issue of the writs. We had also had discussions during the election that perhaps that disadvantaged some people in the community who simply couldn't afford to resign three months early. We also talked about voter transfer. So in Nauru voters can transfer from one district to another. There is a significant number of people who did transfer. And this creates a lot of work for the Electoral Commission and it can influence the result.
DON WISEMAN: With this voter transfer I know that the opposition were very upset with the way this was done in this past election. They believe there was a lot of manipulation. When you talk about discussions how forthright are you in raising objections?
GO: These are not necessarily objections. These are areas that they need more research on, further community consultations, perhaps an approach to government, and it is really now up to the Taskforce Committee. So yesterday was really the first meeting, it was a fairly open discussion and then I think the members of that committee will meet again to decide which recommendations do they want to prioritise, which are they willing to take forward.
DW: From the Forum's perspective are there things that the Forum would be upset at if they didn't take through your suggestions?
GO: Well he suggestions really have to be owned by Nauru. We can make recommendations but we are not here to enforce those. It is up to the Nauru Electoral Commission which is new commission, but we are very, very impressed with what they have done so far. They are working very, very well together and working very well with the community and with government. So we were very impressed with how they ran the election and the follow up they have done. There was a by-election recently and they were able to make minor adjustments and changes. One of the things they introduced in the by-election, they actually produced a candidate poster with photos of the candidates. That has come out of one of our earlier recommendations that we had noticed that some people in the community whose level of literacy wasn't particularly, some of them were actually struggling in recording their vote, putting the right names down. So we had suggested that perhaps a poster of photos of candidates and their names that would be a way to assist them So the Electoral Commission had acted on that and introduced to the by-election and also were able to do exit survey of voters and found that it was quite helpful. So they are already acting on things that they can. They have already started some work with the high school here with voter awareness, the older students, but as far as the Pacific Islands Forum is concerned we want to do is be able to assist to move the Commission to move the things forward to where they think they can have the greatest impact. And really the priorities have to be set by them and then there will be further discussions to decide, like, what sort of system kind of assistance do they like. Do they need an advisor to come and work with them for a short period of time to just set something up or do they just need access to resources. One of the areas they we also raised was the use of media for campaigning, so the Electoral Commission is very interested in perhaps putting together some guidelines around the use of media and that's something I think the Commonwealth Secretariat will provide some assistance with, but we are in the early stages of this, we have got to set priorities.
